Xenon Crossing
by Aromene
Summary: Strangers often have the greatest effect on the lives of those they never get to know.


**Disclaimer: Stargate Atlantis and all affiliates (including, unfortunately, one Dr. M. Rodney McKay) are not mine. But I like to play with them.**

**Summary: Strangers often have the greatest effect on the lives of those they never get to know.**

**AN: I have no idea. Also, I apologize for the shameless self-insertion, but I tried writing it with an OC and I couldn't get the lines I wanted to work.**

_xenon_: from the Greek, meaning "stranger"

* * *

When he meets her it is in a bar in one of the less desirable areas of outer Toronto. He is more surprised by the fact that she is both funny and intelligent than by the fact that he actually strikes up a conversation with a woman in a bar.

She laughs at his joking attempt at a pick-up line, and he's suitably stunned, because not even the women in Russia who laughed at him simply because they _could_ thought his jokes were amusing. She seems happy to flirt and ignores his stumbled compliments. In fact, she seems far more interested by the fact that he's an actual Ph.D'd astrophysicist, in a bar in Mississauga then by anything else about him. He tries to remember if he's ever had a woman interested in him because he's a genius rather than because they figured he was an easy lay and they were, obviously, desperate. He's positive the answer is no.

He offers to buy her a drink, and she counters by suggesting a café two doors down which is both quieter and far more to his taste. And it's not a Starbucks, so he ups his appreciation of her another notch. She's quickly gaining the top spot on his list of "most amazing women I have met who actually liked me". He waits for it to all go downhill.

Her name, she explains – with the air of someone who has learned to live with it because she never convinced anyone to call her something else – is Amy, but her mother wanted it to be Amelia. He tells her he thinks Amy is much better and she smiles like she knows it's a line, but is happy to accept the compliment anyways.

He loses track of the hours and only realizes how late it has gotten when the lone waitress behind the counter politely tells them the place is closing. He hesitates for a full minute before he decides to throw caution to the winds and ask her back to his hotel room.

She smiles, almost sadly, and declines, and the mask of indifference that he's so good at wearing slips back on. But she just shakes her head and asks him for a cell number and he gives it against his better judgment. He's never actually been asked for that before.

She wishes him a good night and he figures he's never going to hear from her again.

She calls him the next afternoon. He is so surprised he nearly fumbles the cell and drops it, because he's been waiting for the SGC to call, but he hadn't expected _her_. She asks him to dinner that night, and in a slightly embarrassed voice asks if he wouldn't mind driving out a little further. She names a restaurant in Oakville, the next city over, and he's surprised that he's heard of it. His parents used to go there to meet the friends they never had over to the house, once upon a time. He knows the food is good.

She is already waiting outside when he finally finds a parking space along the main street. He hasn't been to the area in well over fifteen years, but it doesn't seem to have changed that much. The rest of Oakville has bloomed and spread over miles and miles of irreplaceable farmland to the north, but the small town it started out as is still preserved in the quaint downtown main street.

The food is just as good as he imagined it to be, but the conversation is better. She surprises him by ordering escargot and a French wine that compliments the entrée, and then regaling him with all the places she's been and has yet to see. She's easy to listen to, and she's more cultured than most women he's ever met, except perhaps for Elizabeth Weir. But she is so very different, in a good way, and she can weave a story so well that he can't help but be drawn in. He is stunned when she lets slip that she has only just graduated with her Bachelors degree. He would have pegged her in her late twenties, just for her intelligence and world knowledge. He didn't think any college kids cared about the things she talks about with such passion. He manages to restrain the crass comment about useless education when she tells him she's an arch major, because she talks about it like it's the most beautiful subject in the world, and he's not too old to remember he once felt that way about Calculus. To each their own passion and all that sentimental crap he doesn't allow himself time for.

She talks about the past like it, and not the stars are the next great mystery, and he can't find it in himself to disagree with her. And perhaps, in some way, she is right, because they've already discovered the stars, but they've forgotten their history in the process.

He wants to blurt it all out; to mingle his great passion with hers and open her eyes to the history of the universe, but he knows he cannot. Important as he is, the secret would be worth more than his life. He can only hope that one day she will stumble into it on her own, or stare up in wonder with the rest of the world when the SGC finally decides the truth is passed protecting.

When they have stayed as long as they can she leads him outside and kisses his cheek and thanks him for just listening. He wants to tell her they will have many more nights like this one, but he's catching a plane out in the morning; his purpose for coming back to a place that is no longer home is finished, and he has work and an entire city waiting for him. She seems to realize that their meeting has only been a fleeting encounter in the grand scheme of their lives, but he thinks they both know it has changed them. Strangers often have the greatest effect on the lives of those they never get to know.

She walks him to his car, because it is closer, and bids him a goodnight as she kisses his cheek again. He watches her walk off with the closest thing to regret he's felt in about two decades.

He'll think about her every now and then and wonder if she ended up where she wanted to go; he has little doubt she did. She never joins the SGC, but years later he stumbles across an article by chance with her name – a Ph.D. now – as first author and he reads it without really understanding much of it. But he wonders if perhaps, had the universe been different, if they even would have met, and if they had, if maybe they might have been more than just chance strangers at a crossroads on their very different paths.


End file.
